


pennies built to pounds

by threesmallcrows



Series: Magnolia [2]
Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Character Study, Developing Relationship, M/M, self-indulgent b.s.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-18
Updated: 2019-07-18
Packaged: 2020-06-30 14:01:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19854679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threesmallcrows/pseuds/threesmallcrows
Summary: Matt and Mello are dating now.Matt tries to feel worthy. Mello tries to stay faithful.





	pennies built to pounds

**Author's Note:**

> This'll probably make more sense if you read Magnolia first, but it's not strictly necessary.
> 
> Warnings for brief mentions of past childhood sexual abuse, past abusive relationships, and general discussions of sexual trauma.

Matt, Mello thinks, would probably like to be owned completely. Mello would find it easy. And that’s about the crux of it.

()

It’s been five months since Mello fucked anybody else. 

Matt would put it differently. He’d say it’s been five months since they started dating.

Mello knows it would hurt Matt immeasurably to hear how Mello thinks of it. So he doesn’t say it. He bites his tongue. He lies in when Matt asks him to. He holds Matt’s hand in public. Mello hates holding hands. Generally he is a private person. He doesn’t like—Americans have this phrase, PDA. Public Displays of Affection. Matt likes Public Displays of Ownership. Although it’s enjoyable enough in the moment, pulling lightly on his hair in the metro and watching him get all squirmy, the truth is that Mello has never wanted to own anybody.

Mello is getting a little fucking antsy.

They’ve moved in together. Which is to say, they occupy the same space, separately. Their things don’t match and they have two of everything. Two couches, two TVs. Twice as many goddamn kitchen knives as anybody needs. Matt’s old mattress is still leaned up against the foyer wall, pale and cumbersome, a particularly overweight ghost. It tends to slide down until it blocks the hall, which pisses Mello off and which Matt never even seems to notice.

In his unkinder moments, Mello thinks that all of Matt’s furniture slouches just like he does.

It’s blocking the hall again. Mello curses, not quietly. The room remains still. Matt is still sleeping, as he will till noon. Mello heaves the thing down three flights of stairs by himself. He kicks it viciously from the doorway into the street. Nobody is around to see. It is 5:28 in the morning.

He goes back upstairs, clomping heavily. He’ll wake every son of a bitch in this building if he can’t wake Matt. That motherfucker sleeps like he’s dead. He slams the door open and the gentle sound of Matt’s snoring rolls out to meet him.

It’s very hard to love someone when you see their sleeping face for a quarter of every day, Mello thinks. Puffed and slack, drooling a little. It might be impossible.

He considers leaving for the studio. Instead he goes in, sits heavily on the edge of the bed. He is irritated, pissed; he fully intends for this to wake Matt up, knowing that Matt hadn’t even gotten into bed until two hours ago.

Matt cracks an eye, exploding with bedhead, grouch creasing his face. Matt hates mornings. Any hour before noon, he generally confronts with the attitude of a wet cat. Mello watches him catch sight of him. The grouch vanishes. He smiles lopsidedly at Mello like he’s the fucking sun and stars and Mello’s anger goes down like the moon at dawn.

That’s a hell of a pocket trick for one man to pull. Maybe it’s a little more power than Mello would like to give anyone under Heaven over him. That’s on Mello, though, not Matt.

“Dude, it’s early as shit,” Matt says, and Mello says, “Go back to sleep.”

()

“So this part, we can use the Stetson with the V30 pedal. And Tim Eric or Rodriguez, for the drums—Rodriguez, I can pull him. He owes me for—”

“Yeah, okay, okay, man, but fuck this technical shit, my nigga. Like, these lyrics, man, like, got me like…”

“Your words, man, use them.”

“Who the fuck is he?”

“Who the fuck is who, fucking christ.”

“Fuck, man. Who the nigga got you so in fucking love?”

()

Three words, eight letters. Mello fucks with none of it. Mello has always believed in show don’t tell. Apparently this is not enough. Matt needs telling. He’ll tell Mello he loves him, and Mello will say nothing, because it kind of fucking freaks him out.

They fight about it, eventually, like they fight about everything.

“Do you want me to say it more?”

“Do you want me to say it less?” Matt throws back at him.

“I love you,” Mello says, and Matt winces, and says lowly, “Don’t.”

Mello watches him wander out onto the balcony and light a cigarette discontentedly. Mello had quit a couple months ago, and the smell of it stirs up a damn strong craving. He watches his pretty lips blow smoke into the smog, as lyrical a _fuck-you_ as a guy who says “cool” and “whatever” and “okay” for two-thirds of every day can get. Fucking petty bastard.

What he’d like to tell Matt is that _I love you_ is cheap. Oh, maybe in Matt’s world it’s something precious and shining, but if so, Matt needs to pull his head right out of his ass. _I love you_ is an overused lyric, a bad metaphor and a worse power play _._ It comes at Mello from the dark beyond every stage, from faces he cannot see and people he will never meet. It falls out of boys’ mouths when Mello makes them orgasm, tumbles beneath his bed. More often than not, they forget to pick it back up when they leave.

Then again, to Matt, maybe it really was precious.

Matt’s girl used to say it to him. She would say it to him after ignoring him for days or weeks, and it would be like water in the desert for him. This is how she’d kept him. Starved and fed, starved and fed. Matt had been well-kenneled.

Mello sighs.

He goes out onto the balcony. “Could you cut that shit out?” he says, and Matt turns to him with his arms out, cig already abandoned in the overflowing ashtray in favor of mumbling “sorry” into Mello’s hair.

()

Feeling loved.

Now that’s expensive; that’s hard fucking work. That’s a crushing debt you inherited from your father’s father’s father. Some kind of original sin.

Here’s how you pay that shit off: with pennies stashed in jars, pennies built to pounds; some heavy fucking weight. You have to heft that weight on your shoulders until your blisters burst and run clear; you have to drag it behind you until your legs give out. And when all your blisters are turned to calluses, and all your calluses are turned to scars, then you earn the chance to wrestle God down to the table and say, “I want to talk, man, I really want to talk.”

And this is a price Mello cannot pay for Matt. He’d like to. He can’t.

It’s hard shit.

()

Matt gets weird around girls, around Mello. Mello doesn’t mind when girls flirt with Matt. Really. He likes his boys to have pull. But Matt’ll get nervous and skittish. He’ll constantly check Mello’s reactions from beneath his eyelashes.

They go hiking around in the hills, sometimes with (goddamn) Near’s dog alongside, and girls in yoga pants walk up to Matt cooing at the animal, stand very close while they pet it; girls in sundresses ask Matt to take their picture, “Aw, Chelsea’s blinking—I’m so-oo sorry, could you do another?” And Matt will smile woodenly, move woodenly, slouch and slink, ineffectually slotting parts of his six-two frame behind Mello’s five foot eight inches, and do everything an inch shy of putting his face in Mello’s neck and mumbling “Take me home.”

Mello doesn’t give him an inch. Mello has no such insecurities. Matt isn’t the first straight boy he’s fucked with. If Matt wanted to be with a woman he’d be with a woman. Mello is not going to put his hand in Matt’s pocket or put his hand on Matt’s neck or hiss at anyone to back off. Matt is not Mello’s property. He will not build fences around him.

He would like Matt to be a little stronger. He would like him to learn to move without fear of punishment.

And if Mello’s being honest, it doesn’t feel great having Matt treat him like he treated his cunt of an abusive ex. It doesn’t feel great knowing that if he threw out all of Matt’s clothes tomorrow, Matt would probably happily wear whatever Mello told him to wear; that if, for example, Mello said casually and as an afterthought, “I threw out your mattress because it was getting in my way,” Matt would just shuffle his feet nonconfrontationally and say at the floor, “Oh, okay, that’s cool, I guess.”

It especially doesn’t feel great because Mello has always been a little bit of a control freak and sometimes finds it quite tempting to bully Matt into a small, well-contained corner of Mello’s life and leave him there, like a nice houseplant.

It awakens all the usual bullshit from his by-the-books Catholic childhood of feeling like a monster, going to Hell, unworthy of Grace, etcetera.

To put it plain: Mello’s afraid he’ll meet Matt’s ex and she’ll look exactly like him.

He hums to himself:

_she walks where I walk / she goes where I go_

_oh she looks like my mirror_

_your black cat_ _/_ _my bad luck_

In three days he has a demo sketched out. He shops black_cat.mp3 round to a Swedish producer and a singer from Barcelona and everyone thinks it’s about a girl getting cheated on and no one has a fucking clue.

()

If the problem with Matt is that he never flirts, the problem with Mello is that he does.

Theirs is the usual introvert-extrovert divide. Matt unwinds by being by himself; Mello unwinds by being with people. And Mello needs to unwind hard, because he works fucking hard. He doesn’t know how not to.

Part of it is that old habits die hard. At the abbey days had begun well before dawn and involved hours of rote physical labor interspersed with hours of kneeling prayer. At night sleep would hit you like blacking out. Exhausting himself is still the only way Mello sleeps well. 

The richness of American life will never suit him. In college his classmates seemed to him as foreign and helpless as giant baby birds. During orientation week, they moved in noisily and clamorously, with the aid of overwhelming numbers of family members, filling every inch of the room with plastic objects, hairdryers and shower caddies and power strips as Mello stood in the corner with his single duct-taped backpack of possessions. They struggled to feed themselves and transport themselves and keep their clothes clean. They said shocking things to Mello in passing, about cussing out their mothers and stealing their fathers’ alcohol, that they had expected to be _paid_ whenever they lifted a finger to help their impossibly indulgent parents. Mello had never been indulged. He’d never had parents, either. He did not find it hard to beat all of them out, in class or at anything else.

People said he was a genius. People in the industry call him a genius, sometimes, when all he really has and has ever had is a modicum of talent and more fucking drive than anyone else in the room, in all of fucking L.A., America, and the world.

The other part of it is that old thoughts die even harder.

If he works hard enough, he’ll be good. Isn’t that right, Mello? And you don’t feel good, so you need to work harder.

Sometimes when they are having a lie-in Matt will put his hand on Mello’s thigh and say “You’re twitching, babe.”

He is. His body gets like this, jacked up on nothing. It is 10am on a Saturday; it is not a day of rest. Mello wants to be boxing or running or writing or recording or practicing. He loves Matt but he will not be anybody’s goddamn body pillow.

Mello says nothing. He hates pet names.

“You’re always so tense,” Matt says, and Mello says tersely, “Yeah, I have a shit-ton of work. Can I go?”

()

He goes. He works. And after, he unwinds.

The apple-cheeked British boy that has been dancing up on him for the last ten minutes finally turns round, and says to him, “You look like you could ruin my life.”

“Probably.”

“Well. I’m waiting.”

“I’m going.”

“Next time then, love,” he says, and Mello shakes his head, and says, “There won’t be.”

The problem with being a semi-well-known producer in L.A. is there are always next times. Release parties, house parties, pool parties, after parties.

Guys in L.A. are weird; they’re vegan, they won’t smoke, but they’ll do quaaludes, they’ll do E. They’ll microdose and megadose and a couple shots in, they’ll let you snort cocaine off the sun-burnished planes of their abs and mutter bullshit about being bi-curious. 

Mello used to love trawling through unfamiliar mansions at 3 in the morning, plucking boys like flowers to take home in his passenger seat. Fresh and pretty for a day, or three, and then on to the next. There was always a next. Some boys have pull; Mello has fucking planetary gravity, when he wants to.

He shouldn’t want to.

He has Matt.

But he used to be really addicted to sex.

The way it happened was this: first, he had wanted to die.

When he was fourteen, and the Brothers at the abbey had had to take him out for the first time in Mello’s living memory and drive him to the county hospital, he was so sick. Lying there as fever boiled his blood, jolting through various febrile seizures, Mello had earnestly wished that his sickness would finish him off in a state of perfect Grace.

As soon as he realized it wasn’t going to, he had gotten viciously depressed.

He spent fourteen and fifteen and sixteen scrounging for dopamine wherever he could find it; between the couch cushions of his various foster homes, in bathroom stalls and around back alleys. A person couldn’t live on Faith. He smoked as many packs a day as he could get his hands on and was beaten roundly for it. He had every flavor of bad sex. He scrubbed come out of his teeth in the high school bathroom. His mouth felt permanently foul.

Lying collapsed in some back room, arm still tied-off, freshly plowed by a thirty-eight year old who had talked nervously of his wife throughout, having particularly enjoyed neither the sex nor the drugs, Mello had thought that if he didn’t get the hell out of here, he’d be dead before he saw the year out.

The day he turned eighteen, he went to the courthouse and applied for access to his papers. He flew out to Los Angeles three weeks later.

Sex in Russia had been difficult and dangerous. Sex in America was easy. Los Angeles boys were pretty and went to bed with you because you had a pretty face, not because you had a stifling need that rose up like choking, that made fucking feel like something done at gunpoint. You needed that hit. You needed that hit. You needed that next fucking hit. Mello burnt through boys like matches. He didn’t catch feelings and he didn’t apologize for not catching them. He never stayed the morning after. He was not a considerate lover. For a long time, he didn’t care. The best part of being Catholic was that all sex was dirty sex, anyway. At least he used a condom. If you cried anyway, that was just too bad.

He would’ve kissed Matt a hell of a lot sooner, if he hadn’t already known Matt as a person, if Matt had just been another L.A. stoner boy with edible freckles and a lazy posture. Matt would be the type to catch feelings; Mello would have burnt him up entirely. As it stood, Mello hadn’t wanted to use him up.

He cared about him. Cares, about him.

The problem for Mello is that he objectifies people, when he has sex with them. Some kind of fucked-up Cinderella story; he fucks the Prince and the Prince turns into a pumpkin, into meat with holes. He hyperfixates in flashes: the stippled, wet nap of a tongue. A dirty callus on a foot. One gray eye. Bodies going to pieces. He objectifies himself, too. He is cock head, open hole, dirty talk, hands-and-knees. He is worth his skill in tongue. He comes and tumbles back into personhood with a jolt as violent as falling from Heaven.

He figures this is a result of being raised devout Catholic, closeted so deep it was more like being buried alive, and also of having had his first relationship at age twelve with a person aged twenty-seven. Some kind of, fucking, fucked-up attempt at separation or mental distancing, dealing with the guilt, the shame, fear, whatever the fuck. Whatever.

One of his therapists—not one of the good ones—had said, “I probably don’t need to tell you that dissociating during sex is not… normal,” and Mello had said, “You don’t need to tell me.”

She recrossed her legs pertly. “In your opinion, Mello, do you feel like you have any sexual trauma?” she asked, and Mello rolled his eyes, and said, “Uh, yeah, probably.”

()

Mello runs himself a bath. It’s one of his last, worst hang-ups. Mello believes in exposure therapy. He believes in touching live wires.

Mello gets in. He jiggles his knee a little, listens to the water sloshing around. The water isn’t particularly hot. The water at the abbey never used to get particularly hot.

He remembers so many lukewarm hours, so much steam.

The touches under the water would raise ripples on the milky surface of the bath, raise dots and stipples like the goosebumps on Mello’s upper inner arm that never went away.

He is in the middle of dissociating spectacularly—shrunk down to about the exact size of his right hand, clawed bloodlessly tight into the rim of the tub—when the door opens.

“Room for two?”

“Get out.”

“Why not?”

“I’m having a crisis.”

“Sounds hot.”

Matt flops in without asking. Shaking the water lazily about, like a golden retriever. “You look like you’re zoning out,” he says. “Are you zoning out?”

“I’m not zoning out.”

“Okay, cool. I didn’t know you liked baths.”

“I don’t. Quit sliding your fucking legs all over the place.”

“Sorry. Are you really having a crisis?”

When Mello doesn’t respond, Matt says wonderingly, “You never take it easy on yourself.”

“You think I don’t want to?”

“I think you’re brave. Can we get out? I want to have a shower with you.”

()

Getting out helps, kind of. The shower is okay. Mello rests his forehead on Matt’s back but doesn’t go farther. He’s still in an awful mood.

He wants to go out and pick up a boy off a street corner and fuck him through the wall of a motel room. He wants to hurt someone.

He has to be careful with Matt. Matt like rough sex but Matt is kind of delicate.

Sometimes when he is especially down and drunk off his rocks, he will mumble shit like, “Like, what do you even like about me?”

And Mello knows he can’t say, I like your ass, I like your tongue, I like your mouth, I like how you let me spit in it. I like your dick. Matt has a pretty nice one, as dicks go. It hardens nicely and comes nicely. Matt is nice when he comes. The way he gets, all scrunched-up and overwhelmed. Cute. He accidentally gets jizz on Mello’s face once and apologizes to him for it, and Mello thinks, what did I do to deserve this polite, red-headed, red-faced all-American boy? Nothing, nothing in all my life.

Even while Mello thinks loudly about sex, Mello knows this is a lame-ass defense mechanism he leans on to keep from feeling anything for anyone, ever. It’s complete horseshit. Matt doesn’t deserve to get objectified.

(Maybe, maybe—neither does Mello.)

After a while, Mello says, “I can stand you when I can’t stand anyone else.”

“Okay,” Matt says blandly. He turns onto his side and into sleep and leaves Mello alone with the flat-footed feeling that has come to be so familiar lately, that he hates, hates, hates.

()

All Mello’s life, he has had to be number one. Anything less lit a fire under his ass. With Matt, he is starting to feel the fire. He does not feel like the Number One Boyfriend, and more damnably he does not know how to get there.

If he asked Matt, Matt would say he’s perfect. If he _really_ asked Matt, Matt would say he doesn’t know. Of course there is what Matt wants, but what Matt wants isn’t healthy. What is healthy for Matt? What is healthy for Mello? Where do they go, after the things that happened had happened?

Mello used to think he knew. He had believed in phoenixes, in reinventing himself entirely. When he was eighteen and came to L.A., he gave himself a new name and a new language, and for the next nine years he didn’t tell a single person a single thing,didn’t form a single human connection. And it was fine.

Then Matt had had to go and dig up Mello’s past, and then dig up his own past, and lay them out side-by-side in the broad daylight. Without asking Matt had wedlocked them to one another, for better or worse, in sickness or in health. They have one another’s stories carved into the inside of their skulls. No amount of running or fighting or breaking up would solve that. It would take amnesia, a car accident, an act of God. Death, only, might part them.

If Mello’s being honest with himself—which he always strives to fucking be—he has thought before about pushing Matt into traffic. Being known by his Maker is already like being flayed. Being known by a boy who sleeps beside you, wakes beside you, smiles at you like you’re something holy, who continues to believe the best about Mello while knowing the shit he knows—

Well, it’s just fucking unbearable, sometimes.

()

He prays about it, sarcastically. Hi God, it’s me, Mello. Things are doing okay these days. I’m mostly off the drugs, mostly over the rape. Just one question for you—how do I stop checking out boys?

He makes time on a Friday and goes to church. Mello takes pride in being able to go to Confession, to calmly state his sins and calmly accept penance from the priest; in other words to have a nice, quiet adult conversation about some fundamentally scary shit. It reminds him that he did manage to grow up, after all.

When he was a child, Confession made him terrified and wild. He would be too afraid to say the big things, his throat swelling shut around the words like he was allergic to his own thoughts, and so he would say little things, or make lies up, or sit in obstinate silence or run kicking out of the box. And then would come the inevitable realization that he had cheated God, and that God knew him for a filthy liar and a bad child; the knowledge always seemed to come to him at night, and it would sit on his chest for hours, leering like a demon. Mello never cried, but he had regular and severe spasms of anxiety—stabbing stomach-aches, hives, a pulse that raced for hours. He hardly ever slept the night of a confession.

Then when he was a teenager and newly parted from the abbey, he had realized that Petr had probably used the box to choose him. There was no anonymity in the orphanage; the Brothers, having raised them, knew exactly what each child sounded like. Petr must have heard the types of things Mello would confess and realized that this child was uniquely lonely, uniquely vulnerable. And he picked him. And Mello swore then that he would never undergo the choking dark of that box or any box ever again.

It took a long time and a lot of hard fucking work to face the box again, to enter a church at all, to kneel or approach God in any way. Fourteen and fifteen and sixteen were one long polar night. It was crazy even to Mello himself, now, how he had managed to live back then in determined, absolute Faithlessness. He’d held himself under the wretched surface, eyes open in the black water, hearing nothing but his own heart beat, convinced he’d either grow gills or die of it, and good fucking riddance.

And then somehow he had emerged blinking into the blinding light of America, where kids tried out faiths like trying out ice cream flavors, where your identity was multi-hyphenate and ever-evolving, a subject to be discussed leisurely and self-seriously with friends over the cheapest possible wine, and not something cast in iron the first time you lied at church, the first time you kissed a boy; where your Texas-born California-raised pot-smoking lapsed-Baptist-now-atheist slacker / hacker boyfriend could say to you one fine afternoon, “So, like, being Catholic... Like what’s that about?”

Mello had laughed before he realized Matt was serious. He remembers clearly how Matt had looked. He was squinting out into the blaring L.A. noon, biting his lip, his forehead shiny with sweat and his hands jammed in his jeans pockets. The grey plastic corner of a GameBoy poked out of one. Matt had tried to play on it during service, bored stiff, and Mello had had to smack it out of his hand.

_Paletas_ rolled by on the sidewalk accompanied by the usual birdsong of _agua, agua, helado y agua._ The air-conditioning of the church breathed cold on their backs, and behind them people lingered reluctantly in the cool atrium, fanning themselves.

Generally Mello doesn’t do well in the sun, can’t ever catch a tan, pale as he is. But he fucking loves the heat and the bright. He loved it from the moment he stepped out of the airport into the spearing rays of light that felt like being reborn. He was cold all his childhood. He never wanted to see snow again.

In the beginning he had been determined to cut every part of his old, ruined life out of himself. He ate American foods, drove American cars, Cadillacs, Dodge Challengers. He rolled himself like a mutt through the mutt culture of the city of angels, picking up the color of every street. He learned a little Vietnamese and a lot of Spanish, spit-polished the accent off his English and rarely encountered his mother tongue at all.

But he still thought in Russian, still found himself wearing all black, like the habits of the priests. He felt uneasy when he left his rosary in his desk drawer. He sought the church like home.

You rebelled from your past, or you embraced it, fought it or chased it. Either way, it formed you, one way or another. You couldn’t deny it.

“Well,” he said to Matt. “We’re all sinners, and—”

“Uh, _yeah,_ you for sure,” interrupted Matt, jostling him with his elbow. It had been a couple weeks since they hooked up for the first time. Since then they’d both been kind of rabid about it. They kept one another up late last night. Matt had cracked yawns all service long.

“—Would you shut up, please? So everyone is a sinner, and Jesus died for us.”

“I know _that_ part.”

“Hell is real.”

“Metal.”

“Heaven is real.”

“Sweet! Can I go?”

Mello rolled his eyes. “Well you’re a nonbeliever and also a total fucking joker, so you can forget about it.”

“Aww.”

“It’d probably be boring for you anyway. I don’t think there’ll be loads of shooter games, and cigarettes and, like, fucking anime porn up there—”

“Oh my god, shut _up,_ shut the fuck up, dude, come on. That was once.”

“—although even then, I guess _even_ fucking then, God might save you through Grace anyway.”

“What’s grace?”

“It’s like, love, kind of.”

“What’s love?”

And Mello had lost his patience, snapped, “I don’t know, man, what the fuck is up with you anyway?”

“I’ve just been thinking…” Matt had started, and Mello waited for him to finish his sentence, but he never did.

One minute later he was loping after the ice-cream carts, demanding Mello buy them both Powerpuff Girl popsicles, Blossom for Matt because they were both redheads and Buttercup for Mello because, like, duh.

()

This singer he works with, Tessa, tells him she’s throwing a party that he has to come to. A song of theirs has broken a Billboard record, and she wants to celebrate, “just a little, just a eensy-weensy party,” she says, and Mello rolls his eyes. Tessa never throws small parties.

“Do you have any nerdy friends?” he asks her.

“What?” she shouts over the scream of her blender. She is making herself a smoothie.

“Do you know what Final Fantasy is?”

“Final _what?”_ The blender whirs to a halt. “Who’re we talking about?”

“This guy. I’m thinking about bringing someone.”

“Is he cool?”

“Not remotely.”

“Does he drink?”

“He’ll puke on something of yours, probably.”

“Nice to look at?”

“Depends. Wouldn’t be your type.”

“Is he yours?” she says, and when he doesn’t respond immediately, she cooes, “Aw, Mel.”

“Aw what?”

“Nothin’. You just seem happy lately. Bring him. He’ll find someone he likes, and if not, you just go on and take him home.”

()

Big fucking surprise, Matt doesn’t want to go. But Mello wants to. “You need to get out more,” he tells Matt, and Matt doesn’t argue with him about it.

They arrive together in Mello’s car and they walk in together but they don’t hold hands. Matt is being weird, awkward and shy, sticking too close to Mello when he walks, so Mello steers him towards the dry bar and pours a couple drinks into both of them and sends him on his way.

The party separates them naturally. People are pouring out of the woodwork like ants. Mello is sweating alcohol.

The volume of the night goes up.

He catches flashes of Matt from a distance. He’s mostly camped out in front of Tessa’s gigantic plasma TV, playing some kind of long-running video game campaign with a rotating group of four or five other people. He seems to be getting better as he gets drunker. He is definitely getting louder. Mello catches him now and again over the din of the crowd.

He doesn’t hear him right now. He is in the kitchen, leaning on Tessa as she leans on him, and he is watching this Japanese boy talk without really hearing him. His intellectually sparse beard is kind of douchey but the planes of his face are hard and flat as a windswept plain and his cheekbones are like two pretty mountains on his pretty face.

And he’s tall, tall, tall. Tall has always been Mello’s type.

“—but I’m boring you,” he says, and Tessa drawls, “No! Never.”

“But what about your friend here?”

“This is Mello. You know Mello. Do you?”

“I don’t. Maybe I should. Nice to meet you, man. You look a little bored.”

“A little,” says Mello.

“About ready to get out of here?”

“I could go either way. Why, are you going to convince me to stay?”

“No,” he says, grinning full-force at Mello, right as Matt steps past them. “Let’s get out of here.”

There is a beat of silence. Mello watches Matt blearily pour himself a drink. He can tell he’s plastered by the too-careful way he’s moving. This is a scene Mello has seen a thousand times before, at every college party Mello had dragged him to. Matt never seemed to want to be at those things. He’d throw himself onto the nearest couch and stay there, arguing without heat with other students about this and that, laughing without heat at girls’ jokes, glancing at Mello as Mello smashed around on the dance floor.

Mello wonders what he’d even gotten out of them. He wonders if he ever hooked up with anyone, or if he had just been waiting for someone to take him home.

Has he even noticed Mello?

Matt gulps down a third of a cup of vodka without stopping, making studious eye contact with the bottom of the cup. He’s definitely noticed him.

_So confront me,_ Mello thinks, _stop me. Tell this guy to fuck off and then tell me to go fuck myself. I won’t hit you for it, I won’t ignore you for weeks. I’d apologize because I’m in the wrong. Go on, Matt. One word, one fucking word from you._

Matt doesn’t say anything and Matt doesn’t wait to hear what Mello says. What Matt does is slide past him like a ghost, and then he’s gone again.

()

Much later, Mello finds him by the pool. He’s put his legs in without rolling his pants up, and water is creeping up his jeans. His feet look startlingly white under the water.

“Are you still drunk?”

“Yep.”

“Did you puke?”

“Behind that,” he says, pointing over his shoulder at a purple hydrangea.

“Do you want to go home?”

Matt shrugs. He says, overly precisely, “Whatever you wanna do is good with me.”

Mello’s losing his good mood. Matt’s attitude is really pissing him off.

Their styles of arguing don’t fit particularly well. Mello likes to have it out right fucking there and then. Matt is coy with his anger, hiding it for weeks behind lazy smiles and shrugging shoulders. Like a magician conducting a shell game, he’ll fight with you about A when he’s mad about B, and about B when he’s mad about C, and when he’s really upset about something, he rarely says anything at all. Instead he’ll wait for Mello to have a fight with _him,_ and _then_ blindside Mello with this totally unrelated thing he’s been holding onto for God-fucking-knew how long; he’ll shank Mello in the side with it and then expect Mello to treat him not-too-roughly, to drop Mello’s own issue in favor of fighting with Matt about Matt’s thing that Matt refused to bring up on Matt’s goddamn own.

And Mello knows perfectly well that Matt has this constipated fucking way of communicating because of his shitty self-esteem, his traumatic fucking relationships, his bedrock belief that he’s not good enough for Mello or for anyone, etcetera.

But jesus fucking christ, that doesn’t change that it’s a lot to fucking deal with sometimes.

It’s hard for Mello, whose anger sometimes feels as hot as a minor star, not to get physical, not to get ugly, not to really lay into him. But Mello has to hold himself back, because if he doesn’t Matt will take everything Mello says and use it against himself.

And Mello is tired. He’s tired of the way Matt tests his limits; he’s tired of the way he feels all around the edges of his goodness.

“Listen,” he says, and Matt says, “Mm-hm?”

“Do you want to have a fight?”

“Huh?”

“Do you want to throw me in the pool? Do you want me to throw you?”

“I might drown.”

“You can’t swim?”

“No, I can, but like, I’m really fucking, uh, like, I’m really drunk. And like, I don’t want to fight. I don’t want you to be mad.”

“I’m not mad, Matt. I’m simply asking you if there’s something on your mind.”

Matt rubs his eyes miserably, like a kid. “Can we go home?” he says, looking and sounding hurt, and that puts a pin right in Mello, lets all the hot air out.

Jesus christ. Are you happy, Mello? Look how sad he looks. Why do you have to be so awful to him? Why do you have to push him all the time? Where’s the mercy in you?

He drives Matt home immediately, not bothering to say goodbye to anyone, texting Tessa a careless “got to go, night.” He’s overcompensating and he doesn’t care. He doesn’t even make Matt take a shower, even though he reeks of alcohol and smells vaguely pukey, because Matt is stumbling drunk and Mello’s world has suddenly shrunk down to the size of one single worry, that Matt will fall in the shower and hit his head, hurt himself, maybe badly. Instead he lays Matt carefully on his side, gets in bed with him and wraps all around him and manages to sleep for a couple hours like this, the bubble wrap between Matt and the world.

()

“Matt. Wake up, Matt.”

“Mrmph?”

“Listen, I have to go.”

“Wh—? Why?”

“We’re doing a photoshoot for an interview. I have to fly out. I can’t be late. I’ve got Grace Coddington.”

“Grace...?”

“Nevermind. Focus, Matt, okay. You need to sleep on your side. I’ve put a garbage bag underneath the bed. There’s a new bottle of Advil in the—”

“Stay?”

“I can’t.”

“I wan-... you to.”

“I can’t. I’m sorry.”

“I _like_ you,” Matt mumbles.

That wasn’t how it happened, the first time. Matt hadn’t confessed to Mello and Mello hadn’t exactly confessed to Matt either, just pulled him in by the worn belt loops of his Levis and kissed him hard on the mouth like marking his territory. There was more tongue than words. Matt hadn’t said much other than “oh shit, oh fuck” and “oh my god”, and Mello hadn’t said anything at all.

Now Mello stares bewildered at him, his never-ending bedhead, his chronically dry elbows, his heart on his sleeve, his crazy fucking vulnerability. What, he wants to ask, is this boy doing in my bed? Why does he stay?

“I know,” Mello says.

After a moment, he adds, “I love you,” and forces himself to stand still and count to five before he runs himself out the door.

()

Mello doesn’t know how to model but the way he looks, he doesn’t have to try too hard at it either. It’s a lot of squinting meanly and cutting his eyes at the camera, peeling himself into and out of various tight pants. They go over the raws afterwards. “I like this one,” the stylist says over Mello’s shoulder. He doesn’t look mean in this shot. He looks wistful and tired and hungry, like a man who has fasted 40 days and 40 nights or all his life, living skinny in a land of plenty. The sun has reached in past the shadows of his brow bones and picked out all the light in his eyes.

Maybe he’s thinking about Matt. Maybe he’s just thinking about laying into a fucking steak, because he hadn’t eaten for two days before the shoot because he wanted his stomach to look hard and flat, which it did; it looked, to use a Matt-ism, “fucking awesome.”

He misses him. He’ll take him out to dinner, when he gets home to him.

()

He gets back in and the apartment stinks thickly of pizza and puke. The TV is blaring Simpsons re-runs. Matt slouches on the couch like a black hole, ignoring the TV in favor of the laptop on his stomach and ignoring the laptop in favor of scrolling through his phone.

He doesn’t look up from any of his screens. “Oh, hey, man,” he says listlessly.

“Jesus fucking christ,” Mello says, coming out of the bedroom with the garbage bag. “This is disgusting.”

“Don’t swing it.”

“You’ve really been sitting here with this _literal_ bag of puke for six days?”

“Is that how long you were gone for?”

Oh. So it’s going to be like that.

See, Mello kind of understands. He knows he’s been gone for longer than he expected. He might be in the mood to be conciliatory and understanding, if Matt were to give an inch.

The problem is, he’d built up some image, got hung up on the idea of coming home to this nice boy and dressing him up, taking him out to dinner and spoiling him rotten, showing him off like a ring around his finger. Look at me and my beautiful fucking boyfriend, look at how much he adores me, and I him.

Matt is not a piece of jewelry; Matt is not something to be wrapped around his little finger. Matt is more like moody weather, prone to change. Mello had forgotten to account for reality, which is that Matt may be nice but Matt sometimes gets really fucking depressed and will hole up like a bear hibernating and not move for like, a week, or whatever.

“I told you I was leaving,” he says, and Matt doesn’t give an inch, snaps, “You think I remember? I was fucking blacked out, dude. I could’ve died.”

“But you didn’t, clearly, so I’m not really seeing what the problem is.”

They have the kind of fight that rolls like a road rolls over hills, tussling over who has control of the wheel. Eventually Matt takes them on a hard left into exactly the territory Mello had seen coming, which is:

“Like, how many people do you think you’ve slept with?”

“A lot.”

“Try and estimate.”

“More than a hundred, less than a thousand.”

“Wow, man,” Matt says, very slowly. “That is a lot.”

“Is it going to be a problem for you?”

“It’s not a problem for—”

“Because I can’t change what I’ve done, and if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not spend the rest of my fucking life apologizing for it.”

“You don’t apologize.”

“Actually, Matt, I do nothing fucking else. You try being raised in the Faith, raped by a priest, turning out gay anyway. You try getting through life knowing Who made you hates you and finds you despicable, personally. I say sorry every fucking day to someone who never speaks back, and some days it’s the only thing that keep me running and some days it makes me want to die.”

“Okay,” says Matt slowly, “just to be clear, I don’t think you should feel bad for being gay. I think you should feel bad for eye-fucking every other guy while I’m standing right fucking there.”

“So looking is tantamount to fucking now. You sound just like your girl.”

“That’s manipulative bullshit, and I’d rather you cut that shit out. Could you be really honest with me—”

“Any fucking day—”

“—and just let me know whether you wanted to fuck him?”

“I wanted to fuck him, and I kind of wish I had just so we wouldn’t be having this fucking conversation.”

Matt hits first. Mello hits harder.

“Ow, shit!”

Matt’s voice emerges thick and shaggy from behind the blood curtaining down his face.

“Is it broken?”

“I don’t know, jesus christ, shit hurts like a fucking bitch. You’re, you’re bleeding.”

“I know, Matt.” He can feel his forehead gushing energetically. Matt had pushed him into the sharp edge of the stair bannister.

“You’re getting all over the carpet.”

“Fuck the carpet,” says Mello. “Get in the car. I’ll drive us to hospital.”

()

“Fell down some stairs.”

“Bar fight.”

“Uh-huh, great,” says the night nurse, barely looking up. “Take this number and have a seat, please.”

They put themselves precisely one plastic chair apart. Sulk in opposite directions. They couldn’t more transparently be lovers, quarreling. Can’t stand one another. Can’t stay away.

Mello watches emergencies flow around them; real emergencies, born in on waves of siren noise, rattling by on stretchers. He had forgotten how small they were, in the scale of all the things that happen at 2am. In a stage full of tragedies, they register as a comedy. Some kind of Public Display.

There are worse things to be, Mello supposes, glancing sidelong at Matt and catching the tail end of Matt glancing sidelong at him. You just need to remember to laugh.

Mello gets up, marches back up to the reception desk.

“Hi.”

“Yes, sir…?”

“Actually,” he says, pointing at Matt, “he didn’t fall down any stairs. We had a fight. We’re dating.”

The nurse’s eyes creep slowly up. “Do I need to involve the police?”

“You don’t need to involve the police.”

She sighs gustily. “Okay, sir, then it’s really all the same to me.”

“Great.”

He sits back down. Matt still won’t look at him, but he’s doing an awful job of holding his grimace in place. In a minute, Mello feels him under the bench, knocking knees with him.

()

“I didn’t fuck him, you know.”

“I know.”

“But I did think about it.”

“Dude, I know. I heard you the first time.”

“They say it’s the thought that counts.”

“Nah, man, that’s some guilt-tripping Catholic bullshit.”

“Don’t make fun of Catholic bullshit. That’s like my whole life.”

“But it is, though.”

“... Yeah, maybe.”

()

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

“Okay. Cool.”

“Okay.”

()

They’ll do cheesy shit now and again. They go to the movies and to the beach and they go up to the observatory with the tourists and the teenagers to watch the sun set. They go kite-high to a carnival where Matt wins at so many games that they get escorted out by security two hours later.

“How the fuck’d you do that?” Mello hisses as they hightail it across the parking lot. Matt smiles lopsidedly at him over the neon pink fur of the four-foot tall stuffed rabbit he’s hugging to his chest. “Dude, you have no idea. When I was little I was so fucking obsessed with beating these. So like, the basketball game, like the trick with that one is—”

Mello sort of tunes him out, after a while. He’s comfortably high. He watches him talk. He’s so goddamn pretty. He could watch him talk forever.

Matt quiets down; it takes Mello a bit to realize it’s because he’d put his finger on Matt’s lower lip, because he’d been overcome by the need to touch it.

He takes his finger away. “Man, where the hell is your car anyway?” he says.

“I’ve been looking. What’s the rush?”

“Because I wanna…” Mello says, palming Matt’s crotch, and Matt smacks his hand away, not very hard.

“Dude, it’s not even dark yet.”

“So what?”

“So any pervert could see, christ.”

“So? You don’t want someone to see you fucking me?”

“Oh, fuck, like, could I?”

“Yeah.”

Matt’s face is full of blood. “Could we, uh, like you don’t have to, but—could we do it on the car?”

“Uh-huh,” says Mello.

Mello has kind of done everything there is to do under the sun. It’s not like any of this is new to him. But at the same time, isn’t it all brand new? He’s given a blowjob in a theater before, but he’s never blown Matt in a theater. He’s been fucked on the hood of his car before, but he’s never been fucked by Matt, on top of Matt’s car. Sex is with someone. Sex is _with_ someone. The color of it changes, person-by-person. These days Mello tries his best to stay present when they fool around. He still fixates but he reminds himself over and over that it is Matt’s hand, Matt’s hip, Matt’s mouth. He mouths his name like a mantra, makes too much eye contact with Matt. Sometimes this is what drives Matt over the edge.

Matt takes a break from pressing grille marks into the tops of Mello’s thighs to mutter, “Oh, shit—Mel, shit, someone’s coming over.”

In a moment he’s sliding hastily off him. Mello takes his time tucking himself back into his pants. He comes around Matt’s passenger-side casually and slides in, patting Matt’s burning cheek. 

“Good job. Did you have fun?” he asks, and Matt says, “Dude, you can’t say that type of shit, seriously,” shoving the rabbit into Mello’s arms as he fumbles his keys into the ignition, absolutely mortified.

“Do you want to keep it?” Matt asks as he pulls into their driveway.

“No. You?”

“Nah. But hey, Mel.”

“Hm?”

He turns around and catches Matt in the middle of putting his phone down.

“Are you taking pictures, you little fucker?” he says, dumping bunny onto the pavement.

“I’d never.”

“What am I, your trophy fuck? Delete it.”

“Leave it alone, would you? I just thought you looked cute, shit.”

A couple nights later, when Matt leaves his phone unlocked while he goes to have a shower, Mello starts going through his camera roll. He deletes the photo of himself holding the rabbit with both his arms, mouth half-open and slightly blurred with movement, because he looks fucking ridiculous. He deletes another photo of himself eating in some fast-food booth, looking slightly vacant. He deletes a photo of himself sleeping in Matt’s passenger seat, collapsed at a broken-necked angle against his grimy window.

Mello is no stranger to photos of himself, but those are always good ones, carefully-lit and well-composed, featuring Mello looking at his fuckable best. By contrast, Matt takes a lot of bad photos.

Matt has come out of the shower.

“Hey, I think that’s my phone,” he says calmly, making puddles on the floorboard like Mello always bitches at him not to. He gets in the bed naked and takes his phone from Mello and restores all the trashed files in two swipes of his thumb.

“I didn’t look at anything else,” Mello says, and Matt says, “I know.”

“You take bad photos,” Mello says; Matt says, “I like my pictures. Don’t delete them.”

“Don’t take photos while you’re driving,” Mello counters, because he has to have the last word. “You always give me shit for my driving and then you’re, like, always distracted doing some shit.”

“Okay okay,” grouches Matt. “Can I sleep now? Do I have your permission?”

“Fine.”

“Cool, night, love you babe.”

“I,” starts Mello, and his useless fucking throat ties right the fuck off like someone’s stepped on it.

But Matt just touches his back and says, “’s okay." And for a while, it really is.

**Author's Note:**

> There's literally no excuse for this heap of plotless garbage. Just piled up all the Mello-related ideas left over from writing Magnolia, tied a bow around 'em, and called it a day. Hey, sometimes you gotta self indulge!


End file.
